World of Their Own
by Taranova
Summary: Edward shares a drink with the other sacrifices, his memories slowly fading. Spoilers for 104. No slash.


**I am about to get shanked by all of my readers for implying EdWin. Note: DO NOT read chapter 104 of the manga. It will fuck your head up. If you've already read it, you should understand this. Basically, this is a weird interpretation I made--kind of a "what-if". It's sort of AU. SPOILERS for 104!!! Father banished the sacrifices to immortality on another continent. Yes, very AU. I know, I suck. **

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Two hours after the Day of Reckoning, they are inside of a strange bar on a strange island called Merica. It is populated by strangers; and they are strangers--godlike strangers in the eyes of the natives, though the natives ignore them; they are urban, they are ignorant, they are a world of their own.

Edward is dead, and he is also immortal. Amestris is dead, and it is also immortal.

He thinks he'll never drink it down. The stuff isn't like Amestrian liquor; but no one would believe him if he said it. Their faces are dark and their eyes are deep ruddy brown. Tree bark skin, wrinkled faces, but the palms of their hands around the malt glasses are the same. They've built a world for themselves here, Edward thinks shrewdly. A world of their own where the eyes of God can no longer see.

The people are foreign. They've never heard of alchemy, never heard of Xing. Never heard of anything but themselves. Human kind does not encompass multiple races, they think; they are superior to themselves, because that is all they have ever known in a millenia of history Edward cannot fathom.

"I'd like another," his words are soft, because he knows they don't understand them. Emotions don't have cultural barriers. The pain in his yellow eyes (strange color, very strange color; his presence disturbs them) urges the bartender in his dark clothes to push another sweet smelling drink into Edward's waiting hands. Ungloved, because the steel is missing; flesh waits, nerves tingle. He can feel but he can not feel.

He will live forever, and Winry will not.

"Sensei," he rests his head against the woman's shoulder, her scent of frantic sweat. He is eternally sixteen years old, and yet as his mind matures his body does not; his own memories seem to shrivel into child-like instinct. Everything is gone, can not be retrieved; in the end, all that they can do is wait, lurk in the darkness, for Father (not Mother, Mother how I wish I had never left), for the Day where they could beg for death. "Where will we go?"

He hates to ask her of anything, but his words are broken. She takes a quick breath, refusing to cry, though that might change in the coming months, years, decades, centuries. "Everywhere," she responds, forgetting the doomed continent on the other side of the globe, "And nowhere."

Ambiguity. "We can try again," Edward murmurs, voice cracking slightly, head pulsing with blood unnecessary. He thinks of Winry, heart stopping, soul feeding a soulless machine. He thinks of Jean Havoc and Ling and Gracia and a thousand other faces, slowly fading into memories that darken in a bloody haze. "We can try again, sensei. Can't we?"

He looks to his father--his real father, biologically speaking--not touching his own liquor glass, Alphonse's tired head on his shoulder. May stares at the dirtied floor, clutching her shaking body. Alphonse's eyes are glazed and dead-looking, but the boy breathes, a death rattle that shows on his thin, thin skeletal frame and the military jacket--Roy's jacket--thrown over it. Hohenheim shakes his head, sorrow pricking his eyes as he considers the fate he now shares with his two children.

"Suicide is not an option," the man says in a cold tone. "Throw yourself off anything you want to. Your bones will break but they'll just as easily mend themselves."

Roy Mustang is blind and broken; cannot die, and Edward pities him. Pities himself. He looks at the dark-haired man on the stool beside him. Roy never eats nor sleeps nor breathes, never speaks a word. All of his thoughts are consumed by an intangible, deadly beauty; the beauty, Edward suspects, of Riza's eyes, pale gray shadows of yesterday rotting along with their destiny. A sudden low sob escapes the Colonel's lips, and he shakes lower, damning his eyes and his vision.

They can prophecy this country's demise, watch the black faces, the jungle leaves, wax overhead, skyscrapers, gold-summer on the arid breeze. It will all disappear, one day, or within a period of ambiguous thousands.

Sixteen years eternally, and no one to spend it with.


End file.
